New Zealand TV Company Taps Zentive for ICOMS Monitoring
December 3, 2013 Alex Woodie
|
Sky Television, New Zealand’s only pay-television provider, has adopted the 360Service Assurance product from Zentive to help it monitor its IBM i-based ICOMS customer care and billing system. According to UK-based Zentive, Sky Television needed a way to monitor and ensure the availability of API interfaces to its ICOMS platform. The company found Zentive’s 360Service Assurance and its Overseer for API Gateway Availability add-on to fit the bill. 360Service Assurance is an availability and performance monitor designed for use with operations support systems (OSS) and business support system (BSS) in a telecom environment. The software can be used to perform basic diagnostics and error alerting, as well as more sophisticated performance prediction capabilities. Quinton McKenzie, Sky Television’s iSeries billing and development manager, says the company is always on the lookout for tools that bolster its critical applications. “Overseer helps in this significantly by ensuring that internal and external applications access to our business critical ICOMS platform is maintained at all times,” McKenzie says. “Having a product like this appreciably helps us to achieve our operational service levels.” Sky Television serves cable and pay TV to more than 800,000 households in New Zealand. In 2008, Sky Television signed a six-year deal to use Cincinnati, Ohio-based Convergys‘ ICOMS software. ICOMS runs solely on the IBM i platform, according to IBM’s PartnerWorld Solution Directory, and is aimed at cable, wireless, satellite, and wireline service providers. In 2012, the ICOMS product was acquired by the Japanese computer giant NEC Corp. as part of NEC’s $449 million acquisition of Convergys Information Management (IM) business, and then incorporated into NEC’s NetCracker subsidiary operating out of Lake Mary, Florida. In addition to customers like Sky Television, the deal brought NetCracker big names like AT&T, British Telecom, Cincinnati Bell, Cox Communications, Deutsche Telekom, Qtel, STC, T Mobile, Time Warner, Telenor, UPC, and Virgin Media.
|
